Debian Etch to Lenny upgrade from remote on VPS / VServer successful
Last evening I managed to upgrade the Debian Linux distribution from version 4.0 (Etch) to version 5.0 (Lenny) from remote on my virtual server running virtuozzo. It took 4 hours because the vserver is slow and I tried to take all safety precautions to revert the upgrade if it should fail. I followed the Howto "Wie man ein Debian Etch System (Server & Desktop) zu Debian Lenny Upgradet". This was the sequence I followed:
- make sure there is enough hard disc space free for the packages to be installed
- update and upgrade Debian 4
- backup the whole container via parallels power panel
- replace 'etch' with 'lenny' in /etc/apt/sources.list
- upgrade to Debian 5
- while updating answer the question about config files mostly with 'N' = no replacement, if in doubt compare with 'D' = diff
- reboot the container
- test all services / daemons
What went wrong? Almost nothing. So kudos to the maintainers of Debian Linux, well done. Xinetd was deinstalled, so I had to configure and use openbsd-inetd instead. The apache2 server was running although I stopped it because I didn't deleted the init.d script link. So it was my fault. MySQL and Tomcat where upgraded without fault. And most important the ssh login worked after the upgrade so I didn't loose control over the server I otherwise wouldn't have direct access to.
